EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourcePersonal Backup & SyncHeadquarters: DE

BorgBackup: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

BorgBackup is a deduplicating backup program with compression and authenticated encryption. It splits files into content-defined chunks and stores identical chunks only once, across files, machines and history. Data is encrypted with AES on the client, so a storage server only sees ciphertext. Repositories can sit on a local disk, a USB drive or any machine reachable over SSH, and archives can be mounted with FUSE to browse old versions. Borg is a command-line tool for Linux, macOS and BSD, installed from distribution packages, single-file binaries or pip.

Borg is free software under the BSD licence, developed by the community known as The Borg Collective, with Thomas Waldmann as lead maintainer. The project runs no hosted service, so no data passes through a vendor: you decide where repositories live, and client-side encryption means that location does not have to be trusted. Commercial support and hosting come from third parties such as Waldmann EDV, BorgBase, Hetzner and rsync.net, each under its own jurisdiction.

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Sovereignty score
94 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-6100
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 1, 2026
Headquarters
DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal
FASTLY - Fastly, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
Category
Personal Backup & Sync
Type
Product
Website
borgbackup.org ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to BorgBackup

The European alternatives to BorgBackup come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

19 European Personal Backup & Sync vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with BorgBackup

BorgBackup is headquartered in DE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so BorgBackup scores best on data residency.

BorgBackup is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs BorgBackup together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to BorgBackup?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to BorgBackup include Acronis True Image, Ashampoo Backup and Backup4all. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to BorgBackup?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to BorgBackup include Cryptomator and FreeFileSync. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is BorgBackup GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

BorgBackup is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes BorgBackup an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 1, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Personal Backup & Sync

Personal Backup & Sync: Personal backup tools, file synchronisation and data recovery. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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8 European alternatives to BorgBackup — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score